Mathematics for Human Flourishing at Ursinus College
Nicholas Scoville
Ursinus College revamped its core curriculum a few years ago. Motivated almost exclusively by the desire to avoid “checkbox mentality,” the college envisioned a fluid yet coherent core, one that allows for a variety of options but does not feel like a collection of completely disjointed courses. One of the new core requirements for graduation is that every student complete a “core capstone” course, either within or outside of the student’s major. Open to only junior or senior students, a core capstone has the goal of synthesizing the college experience, with an emphasis on how and why the student’s own thinking and ethical decision-making has changed during their time at Ursinus. In typical academic fashion, the means were determined before the ends: each core capstone would aim at answering a common set of questions, which were yet to be determined. Ultimately, the faculty established four unifying questions for all core capstone courses: “What should matter to me?”, “How should we live together?”, “How can we understand the world?”, and “What will I do?”. The core capstone course was intended to accomplish a lot, but with a three-year implementation period, the college had plenty of time to develop these courses.
Or so we thought. Three years came and went, and by the time rising seniors in the Mathematics and Computer Science Department were looking to satisfy their core capstone requirement, the options were few and far between. By the Fall of 2021, the college had designated very few core capstone courses. Math majors were free to take a core capstone in any department, but those courses were often designed with majors in mind and required 300-level courses in their majors as prerequisites. Beyond that, students had to be lucky enough to register early and get a seat in one of the few core capstones with minimal prerequisites. Math students were struggling to check off the core capstone box. Thus, the problem presented itself: what can we offer to the majors in our department that would satisfy this requirement for them as well as serve the college as a whole? The moment I considered Francis Su’s new book Mathematics for Human Flourishing (MFHF) as the main text for a core capstone course, I knew I had found my answer.
How could I build an entire course around MFHF? One of the main theses of Su’s text is that doing mathematics helps one to develop and inculcate virtue. While mathematics is often sold as helping one to develop “problem solving skills,” Su sees this as just one of many good abilities developed by doing mathematics. Each chapter of the book is dedicated to a virtue and several of its offspring: for example, play, community, freedom, justice, and charity. Su argues that these virtues are not simply useful for doing math but can be applied in a greater context and at the service of the greater good of humanity. From this perspective, the text could be used to address all four core questions.
In the Spring semester of 2022, Ursinus College offered the core capstone course, “Mathematics for Human Flourishing,” open to juniors and seniors of all majors and requiring no prerequisites. Francis Su’s book formed the principal text. Other books and readings were assigned to both complement and supplement Su’s book, including The Data Detective by Tim Harford. While on the surface an economics text, Harford’s book sets out ten strategies for viewing statistics through the prism of virtues—such as patience, curiosity, and good sense—as a means to understand ourselves and our world. We also read A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart, as well as passages from Aristotle, Poincaré, and others. Students completed readings for every class, roughly fifteen to twenty-five pages each night, and contemplated reflection questions for each of the readings. Each class period would feature a “problem of the day,” intended to help bring the fun, play, and exploration back into doing math, especially for the self-proclaimed “non-math” person. Halfway through the course, students chose four previous problems of the day to analyze in a one-page reflection. The purpose was not to offer solutions to the problems; rather, it was to discuss the virtues that the student cultivated when working through the problems. In the final essay, students discussed the virtue or virtues that the student has cultivated the most during their college careers and how this might affect lives after college. Because the last core question is “What will I do?”, the best essays served as a prompt and tie-in to the core.
From the very first in-class discussion that took place, I realized that Su’s message spoke on a deep level to all the students, regardless of major. Students commented that they had never heard math described this way before and that they never viewed mathematics as contributing to human flourishing. One non-math major shared with the class that after reading the first chapter, he felt “hopeful… I’ve never thought about [math] that way. I can maybe do math.” As the course progressed more students began to see math in everything. They began to realize, with Galileo, that “Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.” Students who would not have previously called themselves “math people” learned to become genuinely excited about mathematics and to incorporate it into their lives. My favorite papers were those in which students reflected on how mathematics has cultivated community in their own experience. Students told stories about working on the problem of the day with their sports team, their significant other, their roommates, or their family. It seemed that the students were not simply writing what I wanted to hear but were authentically reflecting on how mathematics can draw people closer together.
I learned from teaching this course that students crave a debunking of mathematics as a purely instrumental discipline, designed only for the super elite. Even more positive than the tearing down of stereotypes was the building up of mathematics as a humane endeavor done by humans, for humans, with all of its joys, struggles, frustrations, hopes, and tears. In the course evaluations, one student wrote that “The course definitely discussed math in a way that I never have really experienced before. I feel like I appreciate math more than I used to, especially since I had the usual bad experiences in grade school that turned me away from it.” I am offering this course in Fall 2022; the course once again is fully subscribed. I look forward to continuing to explore with students of different majors, backgrounds, and abilities how mathematics is indeed for human flourishing.
Nicholas Scoville received his PhD in algebraic topology from Dartmouth College in 2010 and is currently the Joseph Beardwood III endowed Chair of Mathematics at Ursinus College. His current research program is in discrete Morse theory, digital topology, and persistent homology.